The Pomp Podcast - James Slazas, Founder of DARMA Capital: The Perfect Crypto Quants

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

James Slazas is the founder of DARMA Capital. In this conversation, James and Anthony Pompliano discuss his decision to use Quant strategies in crypto, how important institutional infrastructure is, what he's doing with the Open Law Initiative, and how crypto is related to the 2008 financial crisis. And that's it for season 2! Keep an eye on Pomp's twitter for news on the premiere of Season 3, coming this July 8th. -----If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. James Slazis is the founder of Dharma Capital. In this conversation, we discuss his decision to use quant strategies in crypto, how important institutional infrastructure is, what he is doing with the Open Law Initiative, and how crypto is related to the 2008 financial crisis. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. but only as an expression of his opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i am here with james uh we got a ton to uh to get through so uh thank you

so much for uh for coming and doing this hey pop um that's the that's the most happy anyone's ever greeted me on this uh on this podcast just hey pop um all right man uh you've done a whole bunch of stuff uh i'm not even gonna try to summarize it so just what's your background how did you get here in this seat how'd i get here in this seat um other than i told you to come exactly i uh so well since i'm one of the uh the old characters in the in the blockchain space so i have been in the derivative market since the mid 80s i grew up on the merc and in the paris futures exchanges ran a derivative arbitrage book at lehman brothers which it wasn't my fault and uh and then uh and And then from there, a very close relationship, Andrew Keyes of mine, basically said, hey, you have to start looking at this blockchain space, specifically in Ethereum.

So I'd only played around a little bit in Bitcoin. and as Joe Lubin was putting together consensus he was looking for obviously you have to have derivatives have to have capital markets need to be able to trade trade something that you know all these tokens that get built up for liquidity so we spoke about it you know you can just imagine sitting across the table and saying well we want to recreate the internet and we're going to do it this this way and I was like that sounds fantastic but also sounds kind of a crazy crazy crazy play uh you know pipe dream love you Joe but sounds crazy yeah um you did a great job yeah exactly and it pretty much worked yeah and and so started to dive in a lot uh and and as I I went to Toronto

met with Vitalik, Joe, a few others and and really it was that that light bulb that kind of just went off um and i think that was probably may june of uh 2015 basically right after that days early days and i would say had a call with joe said let's do this and i booked a flight the next day to leave sunny california and move to uh crazy brooklyn sorry yeah everyone in manhattan feels like you made a bad decision everyone in brooklyn thinks you're a genius um all right so uh you get to consensus there's what like 20 people probably yep um i get to consensus 20 people um i'm now three months into blockchain okay i'm asked to write the business plan for consensus and and so i basically just is that is that out of necessity or is that because uh they thought that you

actually knew what you were doing exactly you know probably i think i i think i might have tricked him on that one i can imagine them looking around the room you're like well i'm not gonna do that exactly you you know business okay exactly you know so basically it became very heavily weighted into well let's put together some uh arbitrage opportunities and and then oh all of you techies can go build you know fantastic uh i don't know protocol layer stuff and i and and And essentially, I probably, for at least a year or more, was just, yeah, build protocol stuff and not really go in from that side of it. Got it. And so while you're there, obviously the thing explodes, the thing being both consensus and ether.

What's going through your head when things are just going gangbusters? I mean, from $0.30 to $1,400, from 20 employees to, I think, over 1,000 at one point for consensus. Are you just like, this is a fantasy world? Or are you like, man, we're not going fast enough? What's the logic there? You know, it was interesting. After you basically get that aha moment, yes. The sky is the limit when you start to think of it as, well, if I own shares in the Internet, what would that be worth, right?

And if there was this adoption. And, you know, and so I couldn't validate it from a tech perspective, but I could also look at this as, okay, from a macro view, this is a really interesting, obviously a really interesting trade. I would say even, you know, beyond looking at just the price hype and that part, I'd love to, you know, kind of chat about it. I really think that it was interesting to see 2015, 16, every firm out there. So any Wall Street firm, regulators, all the, you know, global consultants, things like that, they were all basically saying, how do I spell blockchain? Yep. You know, we had a great group. So 20 people from one of the big four came in, flew in from London, and essentially they asked, what, you know, could you show me a blockchain?

You know, and it was almost like, which color do you want? You know, red or blue? And they're going to put the blockchain in their pocket and leave with it and bring it back to show their boss. Exactly. And, you know, so now we've progressed where put together a lot of different things to say, here, this is the explanation. This is what it can be. And it was this, you know, art of the possible or just creating as many proof of concepts as possible to say, this is what can be done. We're not going to build it all.

We can build the prototypes, but we need other teams to come in and build on top of the protocol. But we're going to show you visually what could happen. Yeah, showing visually. And then the other part, though, that I think that the hype side of this got, you know, people got mistaken is they thought the tech was done. so when you have something that is this widespread this excited people are looking at this going like okay it must be able to scale to internet right um so you know and hence you had you know the first you know i guess gut check of that was you know crypto kitties and and so the way that i keep getting asked of like okay well where are we going to go and what what are we doing you know in this

marketplace, my view is essentially that we have to get to scalability. So we have to have a global scalability before really it even matters. So all of that, you know, protocol stuff, as I would reference it, is essentially if we don't get there, then it doesn't matter if we have adoption and if we have all of these pretty, you know, proof of concepts and all different types of ideas, it's more of if we get that well now we can then take the steps to say here are other applications that can be built upon this protocol so i think it's a it's a really key it's a key thing and it's key what we do at our fund of of looking at that right we're getting the opportunity to validate where are we to to get into that scalability got it then then you track how

much adoption occurs right and that and that's then drives the price so now you are um working on dharma capital yeah so i left what is that yeah so i left consensus last spring and 2018 2018 and i um and and basically within we don't actually count years here let's just count bearable market okay so you left spring spring bull uh bear market go ahead exactly um and Well, and at ConsenSys, so co-founded ConsenSys Capital. And essentially that was VC. I would reference it as investment banking and asset management. So the asset management side of it, what I did was allocated some ether to my brother who's had a 30-year quant trading service going over all different types of futures products, stuff like that.

and really defining out all of the different parts of risk. I mean, there's trading risk, obviously, with volatility, but then there's just specific digital asset risk, call it custodial, regulatory, a lot of different parts. So kept building that up. And when you have 1,000, 1,300 computer kids. Geniuses. Yeah, genius kids.

really difficult to be able to also stay in compliant and regulatory considerations if you want to be a true fund. And so I left last spring, started Dharma Capital. And Dharma is basically a solution where if an institution wants to be involved in this space, this is the type of vehicle that they see day in and day out. We use all the same type of service partners that any fund would have. KPMG's audit, Opus's fund admin, Duff and Phelps keeps us in line on all of our compliance and regulatory. It's all of those same things. There's adults in the room in terms of not as a negative connotation to those who don't use those service providers, but the institutional investors, if they were to put you through an operational due diligence or

some sort of um you know kind of deep check you would pass that diligence because of the service providers you're using right and in all of our i mean basically you know i have 30 plus years our cio has 40 plus years uh so we we get risk management and trading um we also very much get blockchain um we also have very small uh strong ties to consensus so we do we leverage off of their Alethio balance and several of their different projects where we track what goes on in the blockchain, right? So just imagine, I've had different over-the-counter counterparties where they couldn't, they don't know what a smart contract is, right? I track their wallet and all of their associated wallets. Are they a seller? Are they a buyer in the marketplace,

right? Those are obviously kind of just simple things that we can implement, but it's part of, well here's our an additional edge you know obviously also we look at it from like I know the risk in an exchange so if you have a certain amount of traditional in and out flows of an exchange and now you see you know twitterverse blowing up as well as a lot of funds that are starting to you know be larger outflows okay you're not going to keep your assets on the exchange there yep makes sense what strategy are you guys using uh on the quantitative side So it's really, well, I would just call it that we break up the market in risk cohorts. And I guess I should step back a second.

So Dharma, the way that we're approaching the market is not to say here we're going to invest in a lot of different coins or we're going to have a portfolio mix. We're going to externally do a portfolio mix. And what I mean by that is after we've fundamentally said this asset meets our fundamental analysis, then we look at it from a liquidity standpoint because I need to be able to trade at least $25 million in and out. And then I also have to have regulatory clarity. If I have a regulator that says, okay, now that's a security or something like that, and the asset goes down to zero instantly. Yep. So what we do is we call these Dharma, Optimize, Long, and then Ether.

Bitcoin launches at the end of July. We'll have additional ones. And essentially what we're building is you have all of these actively managed singular assets, and then we can combine them together so that you can have a representation of a blockchain investment. So if I'm an institution, I want to be involved in blockchain space. Well, now I can say I know I have to have these specific assets to represent the market. We don't necessarily say we're picking the winner, but we're picking what is right now part of that fundamental core holding that you should have. And really, the whole idea here is if I'm a Bitcoin holder or Ethereum holder or Ether, the goal is to get me more Bitcoin or more Ether, right?

Right. Well, two parts. So as I was referencing that global scalability, so call that two, three, four years of build. So we should have a lot of volatility. And I know, you know, the market's been picking up lately and we may get another spike. and I would still reference that as a hype spike. And the reason for that is global scalability isn't there yet. So if it's not there, then really just jamming up the market is premature.

We haven't been validated. So if I was an institution, I would say I need to be validated for global scale before I do that. So as we look at that, though, we take each of those doles you know couple those together call that that you know an index and to your point of um you know how is our trading strategy the trading strategy just looks at what's the risk parameters and risk states of each of those singular assets and we trade from that right um we use buy when it's low risk high probability of return sell when it's you can you almost high risk look at it as like uh playing

poker right where where's my risk reward what's my you know my pot odds or or so right so we're risking you know one dollar to make nine ten dollars and uh and so it's more of as you're in a certain types of risk states there's certain types of trades that you're going to put on or not right and so it's constantly managing that side of it from a you know just a trading risk management perspective how much of the infrastructure is in place for you to be able to do this stuff right in terms of you have to build it internally and it's proprietary stuff versus you're able to leverage existing infrastructure and you found it to be kind of professional mature and what you would expect in in a kind of sophisticated trading operation right um well one one part i would say

is specific fund infrastructure and then the marketplace okay right fund infrastructure you know there's we're not trying what we're what we've done is we've created an institutional product that trades digital assets right so all of those big boy um you know service providers already there yeah the one that one that i would say when we look at it from the market side is is maybe custodial but from a running a fund obviously you have all that fund admin and And we've chosen to go the route of we're registered with the CFTC, NFA member. We're a commodity pool operator, commodity trading advisor. And essentially that just means that we're able to trade derivatives and trade the assets that we choose.

From a market infrastructure standpoint, that's the part where it's a really interesting, we have an interesting window. the way i look at it is we're putting in place all of the infrastructure so we're uh you know what i would say is you have audit now we we had to do a lot of explanation to our our auditor of how does this you know how does this work um calculating a nav extremely different um what we what we chose to do from a nav perspective is we said here we know you as an institution care about two and twenty something that you've seen day in day out we also look at that and say if you have this you know basically parabolic type of asset that goes just straight up it's egregious for us to say we're going to take 20 points right so you know if you were you know

hoodling and just going why am i going to give somebody 20 points to just hold an asset for me So, we came up with a really interesting way to say, for these next four years, as scalability gets built, there's a lot of volatility. And after scalability gets built, there's going to be a much, I would say, larger capital inflow into the market. So, during that time, you really are in an accumulation state. You're trying to get as many, not looking at it as a, I'm a dollar-based investor, but I'm a digital asset owner. So what we did was our fee structure is $2,550. So a management fee, five points of that appreciation on whatever the asset that we're holding. And then it's alpha.

So we split in whatever alpha we create. So it's more of we put forth ourselves in saying, here, we're going to eat what we kill. You know, since May 2017, we've been, we've produced 160% alpha. So we're, I believe we're doing our job really well. And that I think is much more in alignment with our initial LPs, which are early investors, ICO treasury. One of our first LPs is consensus. so all of those types of groups are really looking at this as i already believe in blockchain i get that there's this scalability that we have to meet so i want to accumulate as much as i can

you know pre what i would say would be you know call it phase two post post uh scalability now you have very large institutions you have the the different houses making markets in this You have a very robust derivative market, things of that nature. You're also involved in not just trading, right? Obviously, the time at ConsenSys, I think you got exposed to a whole host of different things. One of the other things that you're knowledgeable on and interested in is this open law initiative. Maybe talk a little bit about what that is and kind of why you think that's important. Sure.

Well, so Aaron Wright at ConsenSys, I mean, one of the, I don't know, call it even founding characters at ConsenSys and really, you know, in time. Characters. That's a great way. Exactly. I'm sitting here with you. I've got Andrew Keyes in the room as well, who just finished recording, and I got two characters. Exactly. That's what I'm going to describe today as. I hung out with some characters. All right, go ahead. Absolutely. And so his initiative is looking at codifying just legalese, right? Being able to grab this phrase, this phrase, build that contract, and also then be able to have oracles go and feed into that.

Smart contracts react to those agreements. All of this falls right into place with swaps, right? So I think both of us have looked at, you know, what is the DTC doing? Consensus worked on a really interesting project around that. I created a total return swap, which basically took a lot of those parameters of collateral management and pseudonymous type of trading. And so what open law is looking to do is to say, great, if we can have a big impact within the over-the-counter derivative market, which one has a huge need from a risk standpoint, so regulators and really any institution to understand what's that risk, right? Giancarlo yesterday basically said, you know, if we had blockchain and we could have had this risk, then, you know, the 2008 crisis would have been at least more of a proactive versus a completely reactive. Yeah. So let's talk about this for a second. Right. Because what he's essentially saying is blockchain wouldn't have prevented it, in his opinion. he could be right or wrong, the 2008 financial crisis,

but the response would have been better informed, faster, and potentially more effective if we had a blockchain. I'm assuming you agree, but again, assuming he makes an ass out of you and me. There you go. What do you think? I agree. I also, there's a big shift that will occur. Okay.

Let's just pretend that blockchain does get adopted, So we get that scalability, we have adoption, and all of that risk is being run on chain. Our regulators, pretty much we're going to have to replace all of them with brand new regulators. Why? Because we had guys that are used to 90-day, 6-month-old data to then be reactive, fairly slow-moving. Now you're going to be looking at regulators that could be proactive. So I agree with him that we may not have avoided it, but also all the months and years coming up to that point,

we would have known what the risks are, right, or we've had a lot more clarity in that risk. And so to have a proactive regulator would be a different type of, you know, I would just call it beast even, to look at that risk. It's funny you say this because this is now going on maybe almost a year. I wrote this thing that said regulators are going to require that all – they're going to mandate tokenized securities or digitized securities. And the thought process was in the, I think, early 90s, they mandated that every company has to report through the EDGAR system. then in like mid-2000s they mandated that everyone had to report their data using xml

right format so that the machines could read it uh and so it wouldn't surprise me what you're talking about in terms of the regulators now don't have to be reactive they can be proactive they can save a bunch of time money and resources from having to figure out what people did build cases and force on them all the stuff if they just have the ability to switch from reactive to proactive and they understand that and the technology works i can't see a world where they don't say everyone has to use this technology so that we become better at our jobs with a fair market and oh by the way it's less bureaucratic of a process for all of you involved right um there's a lot of people who disagree with that though i the only reason i would do you disagree

no you can say you disagree i hope you disagree i agree with it except he's hedging yeah uh because I'm a derivative guy. What else am I supposed to do? Think about who are the guys that are supposed to make that change. They're basically saying, I am a bureaucrat, and now I am going to need to make that change. That's a complete nightmare to them. To think of, I chose a position where I know that it is more of a methodical,

slower moving, I'm going to get all that data, and then react to it. And so to now think of it as you almost have a risk management or trading aspect that you are looking at your regulator, right? So that's, it's a completely different type of individual. And so it depends on the regulator, right? So, you know, the time at ConsenSys and today I do a lot of what I would just call it evangelizing and speaking to different regulators to educate, right? I'm down in Puerto Rico, and I always say this one, that I had a two-hour conversation with the banking commissioner of Puerto Rico about sharding. That was the area where you can just imagine some regulators are still not even sure what a blockchain is or looks like to someone that's already going into how is this scalability going to be reached. right so the more and more that we have regulators that are getting educated

will be the first part right and then we can get to that right so i i i would say that a brand new idea a brand new technology it's it's just not even prudent right for them to just completely jump in so you know i i at consensus i said this to joe where okay we have this decentralized world over here and we have all let's say just legacy right and so instead of going here we're going to do everything decentralized exchange trading and we're going to have all of this where oh we can transact and not know who you know another individual is how about we just go let's get educators or just get the regulators and other incumbents one step over two steps over right and focus on that because then you

can build upon it right and I think that that's that's really one part super fun to talk about at parties and go here's a great POC yep the other one is realistic of saying yes there is this society that I think will pull via like ubers and airbnb but you're going to have to also educate right and and i and i you know i'll plug consensus of going like i think they did a phenomenal job talking about talking about that and educating a lot they definitely did a lot of educating a lot of building and uh you cannot knock uh the progress that they helped ethereum as a protocol make right i think i think blockchain as well yeah i would agree with that yeah i don't think i don't think that's controversial

um what uh what are you most scared of moving forward i'm scared of um i'm known as this like bitcoin and cryptocurrency bull so now uh i wanted to start asking people like what are your deepest fears it's like intellectual fear factor no cockroaches to eat but uh what are you scared of he's looking deep i'm looking out the window looking deep at the construction site you know i don't really have a fear no fear you think this is a no-brainer for sure oh bitcoin ethereum crypto yeah yeah yeah no i and when i look at that side of it absolutely um i get so i have a a very high potential asset to make an investment in right and i get to track my validation points so i think it's i mean for one it's a great risk reward

type of scenario so i don't you know i i guess it's more of when you take a motion out of of investments anyways but uh to to really go into this it's it's just what's that risk reward how do i make sure that i'm i validate if i continue the experiment and it works i keep going right So, yeah, darn, I don't need any risk. I don't need any fears. That's fine. Before I finish up, I really want to hear what you think is the most important company in crypto, and you cannot say ConsenSys or Dharma.

No, no, Dharma or ConsenSys. All right. Well, I would say, though, that I honestly, ConsenSys has definitely built out a nice ecosystem. I'm going to fire myself from the podcast. Nobody listens to me around here. You know what? I'm going to give you a different one just because I don't want to answer your question. I think the most important one is the CFTC and the SEC.

Okay. Why? Because we have a lot of different – one, that controls a lot of different capital inflows, right? They're a gatekeeper to some degree. Yeah. And so the more and more that they're educated, the more and more that they're able to give clarity, right? I think, you know, when I look at like a simple blockchain, well, simple to do technically, but from a regulatory standpoint, a complete nightmare would be AML, right? If you go through and get, you know, KYC AML from, you know, Bank America and Goldman and HSBC, shouldn't that get to carry over to other banks in other different jurisdictions, right?

That type of loosening or organizational, I think, would be phenomenal, right? So I really would say that if we did focus in on the regulatory side, be able to support them wherever possible, I think that's where you get the big shift. You look at them as allies if they make the right decisions. Yeah, and I think they become allies. i actually think they already are allies in the sense that they want to encourage innovation the execution like right like the the blocking and tackling of how they do that is where uh i think a lot of people are paying attention to yep absolutely you know and and what's the one regulation you would change if you could or definitely aml i would i would carry over

if we could carry over aml uh like uh attributes right so if you have an identity you got your reputations and your, you know, attributes from other outsource sources, that would facilitate a lot of different types of transactions. One, derivative space, simple. But even when we start to now leave the banks, right, and it becomes pension fund to hedge fund transacting or, you know, family office, being able to do that, I think, would really be an enormous benefit to the marketplace i think that's fair the and it's something that's not very well understood right in terms of the people who don't deal with it every day they don't even understand it's a problem so right they just look at it as a headache what's the most important book you've ever read

uh most important book uh loyalty to your soul what is that well you know we got to keep along with the dharma capital um and and so from the other side of it is really being grounded so The Loyalty to Your Soul is a spiritual psychology course that I went through in, you know, the fruits and nuts of California. And it really gives a great basis. Every hippie in California just rolled their eyes. I love it. Exactly. All right.

And is it important at what point in your life you read that? Like some books are good and some books are, they're good if you read it at the right time in your life. And some books just suck. Yeah. Sooner the better. Sooner the better. Sooner the better. It's just because if you're on that path, you're going to love it.

And if you're not, it's going to make you go, huh, maybe I should look at that again. And you'll remember you read it five years ago. Got it. Psychopath test. How long do you dunk Oreos in milk? Oh, yeah. So, yeah, just very quick. You can't be doing this whole thing.

Are you like a one, two second guy? or like a millisecond guy oh all right that's actually that's on the safe side yeah you're fine um i'm more of like a six to eight seconds uh-huh uh but somebody came in here starts drooling down your chin and stuff oh no no you're still good there you're still good there uh but there was somebody who came in that will not go named uh juan hernandez and uh said that he puts oreos in a bowl of milk and lets it like basically just sit and become soggy grab a spoon or something Yeah, and I looked at him, and I almost kicked him out of the room. I was like, that's psychopath stuff.

Aliens, real or not? Definitely real. Why? How do you know? Did you meet one? So I don't know if I'll get to meet one, but, I mean, again, I'm a math guy, so probabilities are we got a bunch of different planets out there. They got life on it.

What do they look like? When I was in high school, I've said this many times, when I was in high school, there was nine. I promise you they said there's nine planets. Pluto was one of them. There are now over 1,000 planets that they found. I don't know what happened. I don't know if we got new telescopes.

Somehow we started listening to noise or something in space. But there are 1,000 planets now. Exactly. The only thing that is bigger from 9 to 1,000 is Bitcoin and Ether's price appreciation. But, like, the planet appreciation number is right up there. Exactly. All right. So you think for real?

Yeah. They're real. For sure. Will we discover them in our lifetime? You know what? I bet we discover they exist. I don't think we get to high-five them. Do you think that's a good thing?

Absolutely. Why not? Somebody came on recently. You're asking a guy from Dharma, so there is no good or bad. Well, here's why. So somebody said Christopher Columbus sounds really cool, except for if you were the Native American to met him. So, like, could be a good, you know, the new species could be good or bad.

So, I don't know. We'll see. What question do you have for me? And don't ask me to buy. We just recorded Andrew, and for those of you, I don't know if Andrew's going to get posted first or not. Andrew asked me when I was going to buy Ether, so you can't ask me that. Perfect.

They're on like a propaganda campaign. That's right. You will be a convert. I'll give you an easy one, but I'm opinionated to it. All right. So why, if I can't do, I want to preface it this way. Why is Bitcoin a store of value? I knew. I knew if he couldn't ask me about Ether, he was going to come at me about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the best store of value over the last decade. If you put $1 in, it stored the value better. Than any other asset in the world.

Okay. So if you were, so like, using this for Starbucks and things like that, right? So I'm going to go pay for my coffees. Do you look at Bitcoin as it makes sense to use that as a form of payment? In today's form, no. Okay. Like, if you look at gold, right, for example, gold was at one point used. it was just not very efficient it kind of sucked uh it was really hard to measure things value them

transact with them especially if you weren't standing right there with the person etc uh and then some genius had the idea why don't we just create paper that represents the gold and we can use that uh i do not believe that we will get like uh a another form of currency backed by bitcoin What I think we'll get is a lot more scaling technologies, very similar to Ether and Ethereum, that will allow you to transact, but you will do the transactions in a way where you're basically using such highly divisible amounts of Bitcoin that it looks very different than today, right? So right now, if I said to you, hey, will you send me some Bitcoin, most people would think of it in terms of how many Bitcoin do you want, right? So do you want one, do you want five, do you want 10, whatever? I think we will get to a world where I say, hey, can you send me some Satoshis? And that will have similar value, but it will be such a highly divisible amount of Bitcoin that one Bitcoin will be like you and I talking about, you know, a bar of gold, right?

People don't talk about that way. They talk about it in ounces, right? So I think very similar. uh the other thing that i will say is uh i'm not necessarily like a i'm not like a hyper bitcoinization right where like everything is bitcoin bitcoin is the only currency in the world like all the stuff i think there's a higher probability of us getting close to that than people give it credit for but i don't necessarily think that's like a 90 probability i look at it as uh bitcoin's first step was to survive its second step was to exist i think it's kind of where we

are now it exists it's not going anywhere i don't think anyone thinks you know going to zero tomorrow uh the third step is to be an alternative option and then the fourth step would be to be the option right and kind of be the the dominant one um the transition from existing to being an alternative option uh it's a pretty big leap some of it's technical some of it's psychological some of it's regulatory um but i think that uh that's like the next thing we gotta kind of the next hurdle to jump over um i actually think people are underestimating how hard that is right because when you're in the survival mindset you get to existence uh mode then there's like a sense of relief like oh we're not no longer trying to just survive like now we exist now it's real

the problem is that like you just jumped over a hill now there's a mountain in front of you right and so like now here comes like a much harder challenge um and so we'll see if uh if can do it or not maybe i'll buy some ether at some point we'll see but i was gonna i was gonna ask so you wrote down on your paper you know buy ether no i did not listen if you guys have ever heard the terminology fake news i i've got two perfect examples they're both sitting in the room right now all right listen this has been a ton of fun uh if i buy ether i will let everyone know so far zero ether um i appreciate you guys trying to convince me uh but the days are ticked off but bitcoin is still the king and will remain the king and ether can be the prince

but uh no look this is a ton of fun we'll have to uh do this again and i appreciate you taking time to do it cool thank you it was fun hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain

We'll be right back.